POPMS
Saturday, March 20, 2004
 
Pop-M-S @ 1343.

Douglas Copeland 1991 book Generation X spawned the tag for a generation borned between 1961 to 1981. Me, a 1981 baby, I belong to the last of the Generation X-ers (Some find the term derogatory, me, I don't mind).

I'm old enough to once have had a proper cassette collection, before the CD came and rendered those tapes - fast gathering mould due to lack of use - obsolete and relegated to the back of a dusty book shelf.

I hope my CD collection will never meet the same fate.

But yet, am I not someone who download MP3s regularly? The MP3 collection on my laptop numbers over 500, and I'm still downloading songs regularly. Then, there are the MP3s on my desktop back in Singapore which I did not copy over to this laptop on which I now type.

I don't quite know how big Australians are on Mp3s but in Singapore, kids in primary school are downloading not just Mp3s, but videos, games and instant-messaging services like ICQ and Msn Messager. They play online LAN games, competing with fellow surfers in some virtual land.

To that generation, downloading Mp3s are as natural as play and affinity for junk food.

Yeah, for them who are growing up in the cyberspace playground, I doubt they feel respect or any thing in particular for the Compact Disc, and of course, no nostagia either since there is no need or space for nostagia... as yet.

At the pace at which the world is embracing modernisation (characterised of course by technological developments and adoptation), the dearth of the CD seems inevitable. When the day comes, the CD will still hold a place in the hearts of us dinosaurs, in the way the vinyl is held dearly to by those who grew up many many moons ago.

When I talk about "the CD", I refer to CD albums, records with proper cover art and sleeves. Of course, many of us have a habit of burning our MP3s onto CDRs but I'm not referring to this.

As MP3 players gain popularity, there won't even be a need to use the CDR to carry MP3s. Corporate bigwigs are recognising this. Mobile phones and PDAs with MP3-capabilities have been coming out for some time now.

In tutorial, Geoff, you mentioned about the inconvenience of playing the mobility of MP3s, say if you want to play them in your car.

All those gadgets - a normal MP3 player like the ipod, the MP3-enabled mobile phone or PDA - can be put on your dashboard. Then take the speakers you use for your Mac and plug it in to the gadget. You then have your own hi-fi system in your car. And I'm sure manufacturers will soon create an MP3 gadget that can be plugged straight into the car audio system, and tap the car audio system's speakers.

There's no stopping development.

And much as a fangirl of the CD I am, I will now list the benefits of MP3s.

Let's talk about P2P or peer to peer file sharing first.

It started with the legendary Napster, now a shadow of its former self after being bought over and legalised. The fall of Napster alerted other P2P networks to the vulnerability of using a central sharing system. Post-Napster P2P networks avoided doing the same, choosing instead to allow users to share files directly with each other, not through a central system the network owns.

The advantages of free music are many. It's free! And if you believe music to be educational, P2P faciliates this education process.

You know how it is like when you want to "convert" a friend to listent to a certain musician? That friend's not likely to go buy the record just to check it out, he might even be too lazy to download it himself but somehow people are receptive to receiving files over the internet (You can send each other files via chat programmes like ICQ and MSN Messager too).

We don't all have the dough to buy every album we want to check out or the classics we feel we need for our own musical education. My Mp3 collection ranges from The Kingston Trio to Linkin Park. And after one POP MS lecture, I came home and downloaded songs from Little Richard.

The internet is also chockful of rare tracks, especially live bootleg tracks which are more often than not not available in your usual record store.

If the popularity of MP3s could be stemmed, it would have by now, after Napster's legal tussle, artistes like Metalica, Madonna and Eminem advocating against it, legal suits against young kids who downloaded Mp3s. The very resilience of P2P reflects the demand for the convenience of MP3s and that P2P is not going to be just a trend.

And by the way, did you know that P2P services are not illegal? What is illegal is the sharing of copyrighted material, when its author has not given permission for it to be shared.

That's why the new P2P networks - like Kazaa, Ares, BitTorrent - cannot be closed down easily.